A conventional moving picture management apparatus is known which includes: a means for dividing a video into multiple scenes and editing and creating at least one index as an assembly of section information necessary for reproduction of each scene, a scene number assigned to each scene, and a representative image of each scene; means for giving a title to each index for the purpose of searching; and means for searching for a desired index using a corresponding title and successively reproducing scenes of the index in order of the scene numbers. With this construction, it becomes possible to reproduce only necessary scenes by editing an index in which the necessary scenes are arranged (see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-028722 (page 1, FIG. 1), for instance).
With the moving picture management apparatus described above, however, metadata is merely created using the section information necessary for the scene reproduction, the scene number, and the scene representative image. Therefore, there remains a problem that it is impossible to also manage the structure of video data such as the hierarchical property of the video data.
Also, at the time of searching for a registered image, the title given to a corresponding index is used, causing a disadvantage in that in order to obtain an appropriate search result, an appropriate title needs to be input.
The present invention has been made in order to solve the problems described above. Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a metadata editing apparatus capable of generating metadata that is index information showing the structure and the like of content (video data, for instance) in addition to scene section information and titles.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a metadata reproduction apparatus, a metadata delivery apparatus, a metadata search apparatus, a metadata re-generation condition setting apparatus, a content delivery apparatus, and a metadata delivery method, with which it is possible to collect and reproduce only scenes which a user wishes to watch using the metadata generated by the metadata editing apparatus, or to search for the scenes desired by the user using characteristic amounts or the like described in the metadata.